It’s always been a problem for any higher impedance headphones. Being able to drive 300 or 600 ohm headphones is quite difficult, and many headphone drivers are not capable of doing it at sufficient volume. Not technically hard, mind you, just costs extra money that most don’t want to spend.
Yeah but if you're buying those headphones you know you need an amp.
I do wonder how hard/expensive it would be to offer this as a configuration option though. Like if your favorite set is 300 ohms you could just configure your phone with an amp powerful enough to drive them. Or, maybe whatever they do in the MBPs to detect high impedance headphones would also work. I'm obviously out of my depth here.
It’s not complicated, it’s just a more powerful amplifier which costs more money, area, etc. it’s not in most phones because very few people have 300 ohm headphones. That’s the only reason.
